Abstract

The luminescent properties of single quantum wells have been investigated as a function of temperature and incident laser power. A large peak was observed in the photoluminescence, corresponding to emission from the quantum well, which moves to lower energy with increasing temperature and tracks the bulk band gap with a constant energy up-shift of . The integrated photoluminescence intensity was observed to fall with increasing temperature, with a well defined activation energy of at high temperatures, and to be proportional to the square of the excitation intensity.

Received 11 August 2005Accepted 12 January 2006Published online 23 February 2006

Acknowledgments:

QinetiQ acknowledges support for this work from the UK Ministry of Defence, and the UK Department of Trade and Industry’s Technology Programme. One of the authors (G.N.) acknowledges the support of The Royal Society through an Industrial Research Fellowship. The authors wish to thank Neil Gordon, Phil Buckle, David Lee, and John Rarity for useful discussions.